Definition of "subserve" [sub•serve]

• To serve to promote (an end); be useful to. (verb-transitive)

American Heritage(R) Dictionary of the English Language, Fifth Edition. Copyright (c) 2011 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. Published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. All rights reserved.

• "Most activities in our life are of this kind; they subserve some purpose which is not a sovereign theme by itself and which cannot, on the strength of its own substance, become the object of a frui proper — of contemplative or self-immersing enjoyment."
• "Localizability in this sense goes beyond mere implementation in local neural circuitry, since a given bit of circuitry could (and often does) subserve more than one cognitive function."
• "On the face of things, description theory predicts that imagery should depend upon the mechanisms and brain structures that subserve conceptual, non-imaginal thought, and not those that subserve perception."